Continuing with that, in terms of the revelation personified as by Jesus Christ,
how can the U.S. become more devout in its following and have more faith?
What efforts can we do to lead the American youth towards faith?
And what do you think is the responsibility of both institutions and individuals in that regard?
Well, that's a great question, and people are trying to figure out the best way to answer that question.
I think that in the past, we've done better.
And I think we've done better because we've educated people in the churches,
at the level of the youth, all the way up through adulthood,
about the things that we believe and the best reasons for believing them.
I think where we've gotten into trouble is when we've become more obsessed, you might say,
with trends in the culture and fitting in
and maybe blending in in such a way that we don't live distinctive lives anymore.
We really need to come back to the basic things that we believe and the best reasons to believe them.
And I think that people want to know what those things are, but we don't give them credit for it.
So I think the first thing we do is we just say more, more clearly, what it is that we think is true
and then give them, as I keep saying now, the best reasons to believe those things.
People are responsive to that.
People care about reasons to believe.
They care about evidence.
And that's because of the way we're wired as human beings.
I tell my students two things about every human person.
Every normal human person, cognitively speaking, is truth-interested.
We can't help it.
We want to know what's true.
Now, it's, you know, truth's not always convenient.
Maybe we find out certain things are true and we wish they weren't.
And so we might suppress the truth when we discover what it is.
But we are fundamentally oriented to discover truth, right?
That's one thing.
The second is we are exquisitely evidence-sensitive.
We respond to evidence.
We do it even without thinking.
And then there's evidence that you do have to think about.
You deliberate.
You reason.
You argue with each other.
And you come to conclusions as a result of reflection.
But much of the evidence we have, we just respond spontaneously to it.
It's also how we're made.
So we're truth-interested and we're evidence-sensitive.
And evidence is what puts us in touch with what is true.
So I think that we can count on that when we're talking to people, whether they're older people, middle-aged people, younger adults, or youth.
We're all responsive to evidence in the interest of acquiring true belief.
We just need to take that seriously and begin, again, to present that, the arguments, the evidence, and the reasons to believe the things we do.
I think that's where we start, just making it clear.